Toronto-based firm offers limitless audiobook streaming
Do you like audio books? Check this out: Audiobooks.com a new service based in Toronto, is providing as many streaming audiobooks as you can listen to for a regular payment.
Books
01/25/2012
11/23/2011
Penguin pulls ebooks from libraries
Are you a fan of e-book loans from your local library? The chances are that thanks to Penguin, your choices are about to be curtailed. The publisher has announced that it will stop making books available for loan via a popular e-book lending service used by many libraries in Canada.
07/08/2011
A tribute to Canada’s greatest geek
The original title I used to pitch my book Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America was Super Mario: A Biography. We went with a more traditional descriptive subhead, but I tried to make my book not just a history of video game company but also an actual biography, albeit one of a fictional video game character.
It’s a clever idea, right? Telling the story of Nintendo via its mascot? Very geeky – and I say that as geek myself. I can’t claim credit for the idea, though. I was beaten to the punch by Vancouver’s own Douglas Coupland. In 1998 he wrote Lara’s Book, all about the teal-shirted gravity-defying Tomb Raider heroine Angelina Jolie would play on screen.
Whoa, what was that? My American spy satellites (we use them to spy on friendly neighbors) just informed me that not everyone reading thought, “Oh, yeah, Doug Coupland. We know Doug: Doug’s the greatest geek in Canada.”
For those of you who DON’T know Doug…yes you do. I’ll prove it to you.
Doug’s the guy who wrote Souvenir of Canada, and found Canucks’ shared cultural Madeleine, that symbol of lost youth, to photograph on the cover. The picture is of a stubbie.
Coupland did Terry Fox justice for a biography filled with memorabilia, photos, and amazing facts, such as that when you run a daily marathon, you get a sunburn, but only on one side of your face.
Doug’s novels take place in the sci-fi dystopia and magical realism palace of the real world. His characters work at Staples and EA, they’re astronauts and the unemployed, they measure distance by the number of songs on the radio they hear, and they’re flabbergasted to be where they are in life, no matter where that is.
I said he was a geek: geek to me means breadth of cultural interest. And very few people have been so good so long in so many different fields. Did you like that show "Jpod," with Alan Thicke? Based on his just-as-crazy book. Remember that wonderful photography book of Vancouver, City of Lights? Him again. See this stunning sculpture of the War of 1812? Him. That recent colorful clothing line for Roots? Him. He learned computer coding so well for a book about Microsoft employees that several pages were in binary code.
If nothing else, you know of his first book, by name if not content. That novel, Generation X, literally defined the post-Baby Boomer generation. It begat Generation Y, and a clever name for an X-Men spinoff, and probably an energy drink or video game.
But what’s brilliant about Coupland is you don’t need to put on your Marshall McLuhan porkpie hat to find a common thread through all this creativity. (This is getting tiring, but I have to add it: Douglas Coupland wrote a biography of Marshall McLuhan.)
What Coupland’s trying to say through all the mixed media and mixed-up characters is this: we’re all in this mess together. Family, friends, strangers, enemies are all just trying to figure out if it would really work if you asked the world to stop spinning for a minute. They all hide their true
selves behind masks, and then desperately hope someone will care enough to peek under it.
Apocalyptic visions loom in Coupland’s stories, and to combat them his characters turn not to drink or sex or hate but friendship and kindness. That’s universally true (and quite Canadian, dontchaknow), but rarely acknowledged in a world that pretends that you have to be a bastard to matter.
Douglas Coupland is not Canada’s biggest geek: I’m sure there’s someone who is midway through a 12-volume alternate history where Queen Victoria picked Saskatoon instead of Ottawa as the capitol. But he is Canada’s greatest geek: a celebrant of humanity, a defender of pop, and a lover of the future.
--Jeff Ryan is the author of Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America.
04/11/2011
It’s never too late to quit the printed page: An Amazon Kindle review from a print purist
To abandon printed books in favour of an e-reader seems to be the new “To be, or not to be” for Canadians who have until now shuffled their feet when it comes to making the switch. If you’re a “print purist,” (i.e. devoted to the page) you barely batted an eye at any e-reader releases, whether it was Amazon’s Kindle, the Kobo or the Sony Reader, it made no difference to you. You could care less about being an early adopter. When you have the hoarder-like comfort of shelves and tables and corners full of books you’ve collected over the years, well, technology can go ahead and move at its breakneck pace if it wants to — you’re covered with enough reading material for a lifetime.
12/06/2010
Want a Kindle? Not this Christmas
If you were hoping Santa would be putting a Kindle e-reader under the tree this Christmas, wish for something else.
Canadians will have to wait until next year to get their hands on Amazon’s popular e-reader.
10/21/2010
Will the paper book really be dead in five years?
Will the traditional book be dead in five years? According to technology guru Nicholas Negroponte, books printed in paper and ink will cease to exist in that timeframe. The founder of One Laptop per Child said in an interview this week that the conventional book simply won't scale to the volumes it needs to cope with increasing demand from the developing world.
05/07/2010
Google readies ebook play
When Google gets into the ring, you know that an industry is about to go ballistic. That's why this week's news that the search engine giant plans to launch an ebook store is so interesting. Details are relatively scarce, but press reports indicate that Google Editions is likely to launch by the end of this year (some have said this summer). The company will include only those books submitted by publishers, unlike its controversial Google Books service, which indexes everything, and which resulted in a legal battle with publishers.
05/04/2010
US keeps Canada on the copyright axis of evil
How does it feel to be public enemy number one? Or, at least, one of eleven? Because when it comes to copyright, that is just how the United States sees us. The Special 301 List, put together by the US Trade Representative, is a list of the countries that the US says are not respecting international intellectual property laws - pirates, if you will, on the digital seas. Not only is Canada on the list, but it's on what the report calls a Priority Watchlist, which is like the axis of evil, but for BitTorrent filesharing.
03/12/2010
Upcoming gadgets worth saving your money for
Tech lovers, save your cash. If you think there are cool gadgets out now, wait to you see what's around the corner.
Dozens of amazing devices are coming shortly, and we've had the chance to test drive many of them ahead of time.
11/18/2009
Will Canadians buy the Kindle?
So, after much complaining and wailing from Canadians, Amazon's Kindle has finally hit Canada. The company, which launched the international version of its ebook reader a month ago, didn't offer in Canada at the time. Now, however, it has signed a deal with one of our national cellular providers (as yet unnamed), to provide wireless support for the device, which lets you buy books directly from Amazon without having to mess around with a PC or Mac at all.
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Danny Bradbury is a technology journalist with 20 years' experience. He writes regularly for publications including the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Financial Post, and Backbone magazine. Danny also writes and directs documentaries.
Maurice CachoMaurice Cacho is a Toronto-based journalist mixing his love for tech with a passion for news. He's also CP24's Web Journalist and appears daily on CP24 Breakfast and weekly on the channel's tech show, Webnation, discussing tech news and trends.
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